Where next for Northern Ireland?

It is nearly 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but where do we go from here?

I realise, possibly better than most people, what a brave or foolish thing it is for someone from “the mainland” to talk about Northern Ireland. Even that seemingly harmless word, “mainland”, is enough to make me twitch: I know that some people in Northern Ireland don’t like it, whether because it implies Northern Ireland is a secondary part of the UK, or because it implies that it is part of the UK. Sometimes outsiders feel that they cannot win, and I sympathise.

Nevertheless, I am taking this risk with a few qualifications under my belt. For reasons which I cannot articulate, I have been interested in Northern Ireland since I was a young man. I remember the appalling devastation of the Remembrance Day bomb at Enniskillen in 1987 being a news item to which I paid attention, so I come, at least, with a history of 35 years’ observation. Beyond that, I spent some of my professional years involved with the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, a well-meaning body which brings together legislators not just from Westminster and Dublin but from all the UK devolved assemblies as well as Jersey, Guernsey and Man.

While I worked in the Commons, I kept a closer eye than most, probably, on Northern Ireland MPs and their activities. I worked with a few of them, and had a good working relationship with the DUP whips’ office when I had to find chairmen for standing committees. Nigel Dodds (now Lord Dodds of Duncairn), the former DUP leader in the Commons, was a member of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly when I was delegation secretary, and I liked him: an unusual man, not least because, unlike the vast majority of MPs from “the Province” (another phrase we can’t use without offence) he had gone to university in England (St John’s College, Cambridge) and had been a prize-winning scholar in law, though he had returned to Northern Ireland for his professional life.

I also spent six years in a relationship with a woman who was born and raised in Northern Ireland, so I ended up visiting often. And I confess I have vast affection for the place: Belfast is a great city, there are acres of beautiful countryside and miles of stunning coastline, and I find the people friendly in a way which, Scottish-blooded but North Eastern-born, I find very familiar: they are dry, often undemonstrative, witty, sceptical but warm and capable of great casual kindness. Last time I was in Belfast, earlier this year, I saw a coffee machine in a mini-supermarket which warned its patrons of the dangers of hot beverages with a note on a piece of paper which said “Careful, now”.

I should fully and frankly admit that my sympathies are instinctively Unionist. As an atheist who feels culturally Jewish, brought up in schools which regarded the Church of England as the norm, but spending more and more time at university studying the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I either have no dog in the sectarian fight or many confusing dogs. I passionately respect history and I think it is an essential building block of our identity and what shapes our communities, but clearly the religious traditions of Northern Ireland (and the West of Scotland where my parents grew up) are identity soured, reduced, corroded and turned to vitriol. And that makes, I think, people from outside Northern Ireland have conflicting feelings.

Take an example: Orange marches. I would never in a million lifetimes have been a likely candidate for the Orange Order, though I read and enjoyed Professor Ruth Dudley Edwards’s almost anthropological examination of its men and women, The Faithful Tribe, and have no reason not to believe her when she says that it is mostly made up of peaceful-minded, sober individuals to whom their membership is an important part of their community ethos. I am perfectly happy that a religious organisation like the Orange Order should have its yearly marches, as it is again a traditional practice and, depending on how you experience the Twelfth, can be a great festival.

However, nothing happens in isolation. I do not think that commemorating the Battle of the Boyne at this remove, well over 300 years on, is in itself inflammatory or to be condemned, but it clearly opens a gate to sectarian aggression for those who want to seek it. Equally, parading past or, worse, stopping outside, Catholic churches is simply goading and triumphalist, as well as plain rude. The journey from the Boyne to murals inciting violence in the here and now is a shorter one than you might think. Yet should we ban the marches altogether? And I do genuinely understand the pain that Unionists feel when demonstrations celebrating IRA members—not participants in a long-ago conflict but one from which relatives are still reeling, some today still ignorant of the final fate of their loved ones—are apparently unchecked and not even criticised. It is helping to develop a crisis of identity in the Unionist community, but that is another matter and I will return to it in greater depth another day.

Anyway, enough self-revelation. I include it simply because I don’t want readers either to question “What do you know about it?” (well, quite a lot, actually) or suggest I have hidden bias (I’ve tried to spell out any bias I may have).

I was prompted to write this by something that Steve Baker, the new minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office, said at the Conservative Party Conference this week. I hope he will not mind me saying that I was slightly surprised by his appointment to the NIO last month. The self-styled “Brexit Hard Man” had previously majored on matters European, and also has interests in scepticism of anthropogenic climate change, and a return to the gold standard, but nothing I had seen in his previous 12 years in the Commons indicated to me a yearning for the halls of Hillsborough or the corridors of Stormont. Nevertheless, the Northern Ireland Office is often a hardship posting, or at least a test to see who is least able to find a chair when the music stops, and, as I wrote for The Irish Times recently, both parties are still guilty of regarding Northern Ireland as a nuisance with which they have to deal.

Baker was speaking at a reception arranged by the Northern Ireland Conservatives, a small but dedicated band of men and women who have not allowed a complete absence of electoral success to discourage them. They deserve, at least, praise as the only branch of a UK-wide party to exist in Northern Ireland: the Liberal Democrats subcontract their so-called conscience to the Alliance Party, while the Labour Party is so cautious of its alliance with the SDLP that citizens of Northern Ireland cannot even join the Labour Party (yet they seem to overlook the strange fact that Labour speaks of its commitment to the Union so long as it has majority support, while the SDLP is, blamelessly enough, an explicitly nationalist party).

The minister went on to say something very interesting. He admitted that he had good and close relations with the DUP (who, remember, backed Brexit), but that his ambition was to “normalise” politics in Northern Ireland. That is quite some aim: setting aside the traditional Irish rejoinder of “I wouldn’t start from here”, one is curious to know what exactly he means.

He talked about the extraordinary responses he had encountered as he had knocked on doors in Belfast. (One can only imagine.) But his overall impression was prima facie positive:

People were so thrilled to meet a Conservative MP and have the thought of normalisation and representation, possibly even in the Government in Westminster.

(One might wish to note that the last Northern Ireland representation in a Westminster government was Robin Chichester-Clark (UUP, Londonderry), who was an employment minister in the latter days of the Heath government in the early 1970s, but that before the Troubles exploded in 1969 the Ulster Unionist Party took the Conservative whip at Westminster as a matter of course and occasionally one of their MPs would find a way into government; it was rare and rarely distinguished.)

I would love to think that Baker read aright the feelings of the people he spoke to: that they yearned for a day when their politics would be dominated not by the constitution, the legacy of violence or the crude sectarian headcount, but by ordinary issues like education, health and housing. That really would be a dream for the people of Northern Ireland, who have suffered so much these past 50 years.

The conclusion he drew was not quite what I had expected. Asking a voter if she would give the Conservatives her support, he found her adamantly negative. “Oh, well, no, I can’t let Sinn Fein in.” His rueful epilogue was “What a terrible, sad thing we’ve got to that the obstacle to normalising politics is fear of Sinn Fein.”

There is, I think any informed reader can agree, quite a lot to unpack in that. Let us look at a few of Baker’s underlying assumptions. He seems to think—and one can hardly fault this—that any votes attracted by the Conservative Party in Northern Ireland would come from one of the major Unionist Parties, either the DUP or the UUP. That would not only weaken then overall against Nationalist and Republican candidates, but would be a blow in multi-way marginals, which are a psephologist’s nightmare.

He also seems to assume that the reaction of non-Republican voters to the prospect of Sinn Féin success is “fear”. In many cases, this may be true. However great their electoral success in the Republic of Ireland, where they may be the largest party after the next general election, and their status now as the largest party in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin’s slick refusal to engage with reality on issues like paramilitary links and victims’ families has not obscured the fact that they remain, by common consent, at least closely associated with the IRA, and the last assessment by the police and security services in 2020 confirmed that the IRA remains very much in existence and in possession of substantial offensive capabilities. As Gerry Adams said so prophetically back in 1995, “They haven’t gone away, you know.”

Let us just think about that for a moment. It is a perfectly plausible scenario that, within two or three years, we could see Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland governed by coalitions in which the dominant partner is a party which has access to illegal arms, celebrates terrorists and their actions, and will not apologise for the horrors done in its name over the blood-drenched 40 years of the Troubles. For anyone who believes in the primacy of the ballot box, that is something to contemplate.

It would be unfair, however, to regard the fear of Sinn Féin, however justified, as the only obstacle to the “normalisation” of politics in Northern Ireland. Abnormality is part of the very system there. We need to go back (at least) to the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement, if you prefer: all language is loaded), which created the prospect of devolved government for Northern Ireland. It is worth observing that one long-term effect of the B/GFA has been to marginalise the mainstream Unionist and Nationalist parties, the UUP and the SDLP, and to promote the extremes, the DUP and Sinn Féin. (You may be permitted an ironic laugh that the DUP opposed the B/GFA in 1998 yet have consistently supplied Northern Ireland’s first ministers since the Assembly’s second period of life in 2007.)

The Assembly which was born from the B/GFA is a peculiar institution, in habit, procedure and design. (I have always thought it interesting that, alone of the devolved assemblies, its URL remains a .gov.uk domain. Significant?) Since its first meeting in July 1998, it has been suspended for political reasons five times, although two were only 24-hour suspensions. For eight years and more of its short life, then, it has been a sleeping body.

The composition of the Assembly is a convoluted business. Under the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which is the father of all of the present constitutional arrangements, there are supposed to be elections for the Assembly every four years, though in 2014 this was extended to five years, to make Northern Ireland consistent with the other devolved assemblies. In fact, for various reasons, there have been elections in 1998, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2017 and 2022, and it is not impossible there will be another soon if the current deadlock cannot be resolved. It uses the single transferrable vote system to elect MLAs in multi-member constituencies, but, unlike the Scottish Parliament, does not have constituency and list members.

That is all perfectly reasonable. What is unusual is that each MLA must declare him or herself “Unionist'“, “Nationalist” or “other” after an election, and that designation may only be changed once during the period of an electoral mandate. So the sectarian conflict is not just recognised but hard-wired into the Assembly. Why does that matter? Because the process forming a working executive in the Assembly is complicated and unique to the circumstances of Northern Ireland.

Baker talks of “normalisation”. One might humbly suggest that a normal assembly would be able to find an executive from within itself on the basis either of a single party winning enough seats to govern, as the SNP did in Scotland from 2016 to 2021, or for parties to gather together and find sufficient areas of agreement to take power. Not so at Stormont, where there is a mandatory coalition. Every party must participate, more or less, or the whole system falls apart.

The two largest parties—currently Sinn Féin and the DUP—must agree to nominate a First Minister and deputy First Minister. These positions are in theory and, largely, in practice, co-equal, a dyarchy that must taken decisions together and (supposedly) take responsibility too, and the lower-case ‘d’ in “deputy First Minister” is a huge issue of protocol. So far, the First Minister has always come from a Unionist party, but at this year’s election Sinn Féin won more votes than any other party (though Unionist parties retain a small majority), and therefore they have the right to nominate a candidate to be First Minister. (This has yet to happen.)

So we have a system which forces together the two largest parties, which are also the two furthest apart in ideological terms. One can understand the reasons for this, certainly when the system was being created in 1998, but it is not “normal”. The other parties are assigned ministerial positions according to the d’Hondt system, though they are not required to participate. In fact, no major party has chosen to stand out, though one must recognise the doggedness of Jim Allister KC’s Traditional Unionist Voice, a home for those who find the Paisleyite tradition too milquetoast and lacking that whiff of sulphur. Allister, an intelligent and able man, is his party’s only MLA.

There have been suggestions since 1998 that perhaps the idea of mandatory coalition served an initial purpose but has had its day. Most of the parties have courted this idea at one point or other and on paper all but Sinn Féin are committed to it. The Republican party has generally been held to fear exclusion without an institutional right to inclusion, although Sam McBride wrote in 2020 that they had perhaps less to fear than had been the case as the DUP has become more politically toxic.

A purists’s interpretation of “normalisation” would say that any institutional strictures on coalitions should be swept away. After all, why should the Assembly place limitations on how its elected members behave or coalesce? Why not count the votes, name the MLAs and step back from the arena?

It’s not quite that easy (it never is in Northern Ireland). Although the SDLP and the Alliance support the ending of mandatory coalition, they, and others, still want to see some sort of cross-community inclusion written into the system. For non-unionists, the great horror hanging over everything they do is a return to "majority rule”, the condition which obtained during the life of the old Parliament of Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1972. This bicameral institution, with a House of Commons and a Senate, had democratic elections, but the franchise was deeply skewed against the Catholic population, and it returned reliable Unionist majorities at every election. In effect, if not in theory, Northern Ireland was a one-party state.

It would be difficult to find many who think returning to that situation would be a positive step. Yet it is easier to know what one doesn’t want than it is to identify what one desires. In fact, even without any institutional fetters, it is not clear what would happen if the current Assembly had no imposed coalition. The party standings are as follows:

Sinn Féin 27

DUP 25

Alliance 17

UUP 9

SDLP 8

TUV 1

PBP 1

Ind. Un. 2

In an Assembly of 90, with 46 MLAs needed for a majority, it would seem that the Alliance would essentially be able to choose between a Unionist coalition and a Republican/Nationalist one, but even that assumes that the DUP and UUP would happily work together, or, even more, that the SDLP would sit alongside Sinn Féin.

Yet a “moderate” cross-community grouping of, say, the Alliance, the UUP and the SDLP would be seriously short of the numbers required. It would, it is not absurd to suggest, lead either to spontaneous cross-community cooperation or complete deadlock. But Northern Ireland is no stranger to deadlock.

We come back, then, to Steve Baker’s ambition of “normalisation”. One step towards that would be the watering-down of the coalition rules, requiring a lower bar of cross-community participation, and allowing the parties to construct their own government. But that would lead, inevitably, for calls to scrap the First Minister/deputy First Minister dyarchy, with a single chief executive being appointed on the basis of the strength of his or her coalition. That might have achieved the support of the majority before the 2022 election, but Unionists have now been faced with the very real prospect of a Sinn Féin First Minister, and many do not like it. How much less appealing would they find the idea of Sinn Féin heading the government without the counterbalance of a Unionist “deputy”?

We seem to end a slightly circular journey at a conclusion that there are several ways in which politics in Northern Ireland could be normalised, but, of course, they are impractical at the present time. That is a précis which will always have truth to it. Where is the magic key? What resolves this deadlock? For politics in Northern Ireland is currently anything but normal: there is an Assembly but it cannot meet because the two largest parties will not agree on a candidate for speaker; there is no executive; and such decisions as must be made are being driven by the NIO in Whitehall and largely implemented by caretaker ministers and unelected civil servants. In some ways, Northern Ireland has become the perfect bureaucratic state. But this cannot last. Where is the accountability? Where is the direction, the dynamism? Where is the debate, the lifeblood of democratic institutions?

Change is coming. Under the terms of the Northern Ireland Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern Act, passed earlier this year, the caretaker ministers still in place from before the last election will demit office later this month, on 28 October. That will leave only civil servants in place. After the dissolution of the remnants of an executive, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, has 12 weeks in which he can call a new election. That poll would take place no later than January 2023.

Would a new election kickstart the democratic process? It is hard to see how. The electorate is likely to return a result very similar to that at the last time of asking, in May this year. While the DUP and Sinn Féin remain deadlocked, there will be no progress. And they remain deadlocked on the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol, current subject to legislation going through Westminster. The bill has passed the House of Commons but has yet to see serious action in the Lords. And a pessimist might say that if it weren’t the Protocol it would just be some other damned thing…

All of this means that I don’t know what is next for Northern Ireland’s political institutions. There is much that does not work. I think the original model of coalition is out of date and cumbersome, and with the support of almost all parties, that must surely be revised, while retaining some cross-community safeguards. But identifying discredited or obsolete institutions is easier than replacing them. It may be—and I say this as a lifelong Unionist with a visceral dislike of Sinn Féin—that we may have to countenance the possibility of a Republican-led coalition. There are, I think, enough safeguards in the B/GFA to reassure Unionists that they would not be dragged into a united Ireland without their consent, and I think it may be time for them to let Sinn Féin be held responsible for everyday political concerns: education, housing, health. If they fail, then their critics will not be silent. But at least it would be a debate on “normal” issues.

This would have to be done in parallel with many other things. PSNI is a battered and unsustainable organisation which Unionists, with good reason, no longer trust. It must be replaced by something effective and credible. There needs to be a serious political effort to recognise the disenfranchisement felt by working-class Loyalist communities, and the dangerous results which will flow from ignoring it. And, somehow, Northern Ireland must find its place in any kind of “levelling-up”, its economy modernised and weaned off its disastrous addiction to the public purse. This is not just a background but an essential context to any changes to the Assembly and Executive.

It’s a lot. I realise that. It’s especially a lot for a Westminster system which finds Northern Ireland baffling, irritating and distracting. There are people at Westminster who care, and so we must all hope they come to the fore. If that is a triumph of optimism, it’s simply because I can’t see what the alternative is.